Troubled start for Toyota drivers

Italian Jarno Trulli, fresh from scoring his first points of the season at the Canadian Grand Prix last weekend, could only set the 23rd quickest time after struggling with the handling of his car.

"It was a difficult day due to some problems with the sensors on my car. We also had a lot of graining on our tyres and I had some understeer," said Trulli. "We tried to put in a long run in order to understand that better but it has been a disrupted day's work for us.

"It's hard to predict how we will get on here because it's another track where we do no testing. But while we still have some work to do on reliability, our car is improving with every race. If we get the right conditions and we can get the most out of our tyres then we can expect to be competitive."

Teammate Ralf Schumacher also had problems with his Toyota, complaining about a strong vibration. The German was only 27th quickest, three seconds off the pace.

"The circuit was very slippery today and unfortunately we couldn't complete our programme of work because we had a lot of vibrations on our car," said Schumacher, turning 31 today. "We tried to rectify the problem but it returned towards the end of the second session.

"So that meant we were unable to put in a lot of laps today and tonight we will need to double-check what is causing the issue. At one point Sato lost a piece of bodywork from his Super Aguri in front of me and I was hit but it doesn't seem to have caused any damage.

"Now we have to look to tackle these problems for the rest of the weekend."